Jewish congregations and other communal institutions

Among the many records of Jewish interest held by the National Archives, a small number have been identified relating to various synagogues, Boards of Deputies or other communal facilities and organisations. Several files have been located, for instance, which provide valuable early statistical detail on the Jewish community in Western Australia (as well as specific information on the Perth Hebrew Congregation). These include:

INTELLIGENCE REPORTS OF INTERNMENTS, REPATRIATIONS, AFFILIATIONS AND GENERAL INVESTIGATIONS, MULTIPLE NUMBER SERIES, 1915–20			PP14/1
Recorded by:	1915–1919	Headquarters 5th Military District (I), CMF (CA 4811)
	1919–1920	Investigation Branch, WA (CA 908)
	Quantity:	6.48 metres (Perth)
	Perth Hebrew Congregation, c1915–20		PP14/1, 1/12/78
GENERAL ADMINISTRATION, METHODS AND PRINCIPLES, ANNUAL SINGLE NUMBER SERIES, 1899–1956			PP95/1
Recorded by:	1899–1956	Colonial Secretary’s Office (CA 1256)
	Quantity:	13.14 metres (Perth)
	Files in this series show methods and principles to be used in continuing statistical activity in WA.
	Statistical return relating to the Hebrew Churches and Sunday Schools in the colony, c1899		PP95/1, 1899/321
GENERAL ADMINISTRATION, METHODS AND PRINCIPLES, ANNUAL SINGLE NUMBER SERIES, 1898–1960			PP131/1
Recorded by:	1898–1957	Colonial Secretary’s Office (from 1926), Chief Secretary’s Office (CA 1256)
	Quantity:	12.60 metres (Perth)
	1898 – Statistics from Hebrew Congregation, Western Australia, 1898		PP131/1, 1898/114
	‘Hebrew Standard’ with article on Western Australia, 1905		PP131/1, 1905/187
	Population of the state and Hebrew population in the state at each census, 1905		PP131/1, 1905/74
APPLICATIONS FOR REGISTRATION OF BOOKS, PAPERS AND PERIODICALS FOR TRANSMISSION BY POST AND ASSOCIATED CORRESPONDENCE, MULTIPLE NUMBER SERIES, 1965–67			PP263/1
Recorded by:	1965–1967	Post-Master General’s Department, GPO, Perth (CA 1035)
	Quantity:	1.80 metres (Perth)
	Registration of newspapers, periodicals and books – Perth Hebrew Congregation Inc., 1964–70		PP263/1, 228/4/1527
Jewish boys singing at the Synagogue, Melbourne 1969. NAA: A1200, L83906
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, CLASS 1 (GENERAL, PASSPORTS), 1939–50			A659
Recorded by:	1939–1945	Department of the Interior (II), Central Office (CA 31)
	Quantity:	101.25 metres (Canberra)
	The Great Synagogue – Information re Jewish Cemetery, 1942		A659, 1943/1/7303
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, SINGLE NUMBER SERIES WITH ‘V’ (VICTORIA PREFIX, 1924–62			B741
Recorded by:	1927–1946	Investigation Branch, Victoria (CA 907)
	Quantity:	29.88 metres (Melbourne)
	Diamond, Joseph – Ruschin, Jacob – Bear, Nathan – Rischin, Jacob – Dabscheck, Jacob – Solomon, Moms – Krakowski, Louie – Trustees of Carlton Hebrew Congregation, 1918–28		B741, V/485
	Isaac Hurwitz. Application for permission for relatives to enter Australia. Jewish National Library ‘Kadimah’ [27 pages], 1924–38		B741, B/675
	Palmerston Street Synagogue – application for admission of a rabbi, 1932		B741, V/10212
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, SINGLE NUMBER SERIES WITH ‘D’ (UNEMPLOYMENT AND SICKNESS BENEFIT) PREFIX, 1946–74			A887
Recorded by:	1946–1972	Department of Social Services, Central Office (CA 32)
	Quantity:	15.21 metres (Canberra)
	The series consists of personal benefit and administration files.
	Melbourne Jewish Friendly Society – East Malvern Victoria, 1946		A887, D407
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, ALPHABETICAL SERIES, 1927–42			A981
Recorded by:	1927–1942	Department of External Affairs (II) (CA 18)
	Quantity:	163.27 metres (Canberra)
	External Affairs Department. Jewish Organisations in Various Parts of the World, 1942		A981, ORG 82
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, SC SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL SERIES (OLD FILES), 1926			A3934
Recorded by:	1926–1926	Prime Minister’s Department (CA 12)
	Quantity:	1.6250 metres (Canberra)
	The series consists of correspondence files about confidential matters, including censorship, immigration and tariffs.
	Jewish National Fund, 1917–18		A3934, SC17 4
SUBJECT FILES, MULTIPLE NUMBER SERIES, 1949–			A6122
Recorded by:	1949–	Australian Security Intelligence Organization (CA 1297)
	Quantity:	34.74 metres (Canberra)
	Jewish Board of Deputies, 1944–51		A6122, 185
R G CASEY, MINISTERIAL CORRESPONDENCE FILES, ANNUAL SINGLE NUMBER SERIES, 1956–60			A10302
Recorded by:	1956–1960	Department of External Affairs (II), Central Office (CA 18)
	Quantity:	9.10 metres (Canberra)
	World Jewish Congress, 1959		A10302, 1959/146
PROPERTY HIRING FILES, MULTIPLE NUMBER SERIES WITH ALPHABETICAL PREFIX, 1946–52			B985
Recorded by:	1946–1949	Hirings Section, Central Office, Department of the Interior (II) (CA 2777)
	Quantity:	18.64 metres (Melbourne)
	The series consists of property hiring files, inherited from the Army History Service (in 1946).
	Hunters Hill. Sir Moses Montefiore Jewish Home Serial 2038 [contains plan of property and Annual Report and Financial statement of 1942], 1942–47		B985, N/5/64
ARCHITECTURAL PLANS, SINGLE NUMBER SERIES WITH ‘HA’ (HOMES ACT) PREFIX, 1954–			J1079
Recorded by:	1972–1984	Department of Social Security, State Headquarters, QLD (CA 2394)
	Quantity:	4.08 metres (Brisbane)
	The series consists of plans associated with the construction of homes for the aged.
	Jewish Community Centre, 1975		J1079, HA184/1
CORRESPONDENCE FILES, SUBSIDISED PENSION HOMES, SINGLE NUMBER SERIES WITH ALPHABETICAL PREFIX, 1955–75			PP572/1
Recorded by:	1955–1972	Director of Social Services, WA (CA 848)
	1972–1975	Department of Social Security Headquarters, WA (CA 2386)
	Quantity:	3.43 metres (Perth)
	These records contain statistical information, reports on investigations about subsidies paid by the Government to homes for the aged.
	Perth Jewish Aged Homes Society Inc. [Maurice Zeffert Memorial Home] – Stage 2 (subsidised aged pension homes), 1955–75		PP572/1, WA26 Part 1
	Perth Jewish Aged Homes Society Inc. [Maurice Zeffert Memorial Home] – Stage 2 (subsidised aged pension homes), 1955–75		PP572/1, WA26 Part 2

The Jewish press

The first bid to institute a home-grown Australian Jewish newspaper was in 1842 when a Sydney edition of the London journal Voice of Jacob failed to survive more than three issues. Twenty years later, a Victorian edition of London’s Jewish Chronicle disappeared even more quickly (and without trace). The Australian Israelite, founded and edited in Melbourne by the indomitable Solomon Joseph in 1871 endured longer, finally succumbing to economics and communal factionalism after four years. Critically acclaimed, and fearlessly frank, the Australian Israelite was a model for newspapers of its time. It remains a milestone in Australian Jewish journalism and an invaluable source for historians of the period.[54]

Since then, an estimated 140 Jewish newspapers and periodicals (of many descriptions) have been produced in Australia.[55] Some newspapers, like the Dialectic, Australian Hebrew Times, Australian Jewish Gazette and the lavishly-illustrated Australasian Hebrew, failed to endure beyond a few months. By contrast, the [Australian] Jewish Herald, under the editorship of such formidable identities as Rev Elias Blaubaum, Nahum Barnet and Newman Rosenthal, survived more than 80 years. The Australian Jewish News still appears weekly more than 60 years after it started, while the Hebrew Standard, established in Sydney in 1896, continues (following several name changes) thanks to its merger with the AJN.

A wide range of other serials has included journals as varied as the Australian Jewish Forum, The Progressive Outlook, The Bridge, Generation, Menorah, The Australia-Israel Review and Without Prejudice. For a comprehensive listing of Australian Jewish periodicals – at least to the 1980s – see Marianne Dacy’s Periodical Publications from the Australian Jewish Community: A Union List. A survey of holdings has located a number of items relating to the Australian Jewish press (including issues of censorship). These include:

Religious observances

On a number of occasions issues related to aspects of Jewish religious observance or Jewish communal politics have been raised and investigated by Government departments, eg inquiries into the humaneness of kosher killing of animals. A suggestion by the Attorney-General that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry be empowered to nominate Jewish marriage celebrants (in line with the new Marriage Act) caused a major contretemps between the community’s lay and spiritual leaders in the 1960s.[56]

Records of these controversies are located in the following series:

Antisemitism in Australia

‘Antisemitism was never part of the Australian mainstream’, observes historian Hilary Rubinstein, noting that no social or legislative impediment prevented Sir John Monash or Sir Isaac Isaacs from reaching the pinnacle of military and civic leadership in their time.[57] To some extent, this was due to the ‘normalcy’ of Jewish life in this country – Jews had been here ever since 1788, and until the 1930s, the majority were English-speakers. Also the Australian colonies were born ‘modern’, spawned by an English-speaking (Protestant) democracy which had no strong indigenous tradition of Jew-hatred. Indeed, Australia – and Britain – have been notable for an ongoing tradition of philosemitism. The small size of the Jewish community ensured that Jews were non-threatening numerically.

Even so, antisemitism has always been a factor (more often a minor ‘irritant’ than a full-blown pathology, admittedly) with which Australian Jews have had to contend. In general, the local Jewish community has managed to keep manifestations of Jew-hatred in perspective (the exception clearly being the response to the ‘Russian invasion’ of the 1880s and 1890s).[58] Communal commentators have argued that the rise and consolidation of the home-grown Anglo-Australian Jewish middle class in the late 19th century was paralleled by the emergence of ‘populist, pro-Labor antisemitism’.

At one level, this took the form of the proliferation of unflattering mythology, including the depiction of Jews in popular literature and culture as stereotyped unscrupulous financiers, parasitic profiteers or social-climbing vulgarians. A number of well-known literary figures were persistent offenders in this regard, among them Marcus Clarke, Norman Lindsay, Henry Lawson and ‘lesser’ contributors to Smith’s Weekly, Melbourne Punch, The Bulletin, or Labor newspapers such as The Worker, Tocsin or Labor Call. The Bulletin, for instance, ‘used the euphemism ‘Cohen’ for international finance, and ‘John Bull Cohen’ for British-Jewish monetary power, just as it used ‘Ikey Mo’ in its mocking portrayal of Jewish bookmakers and moneylenders’.[59] There were claims, quite widely believed, that the Boer War had been fought primarily in the interests of Jewish capital. Subsequently concerns were expressed at seemingly dubious financial and familial links between Anglo-Jewry and ‘the enemy’. Lawson, for one, expounded the view that Jews were profiting from World War I.

At another level, anti-Jewish sentiment was clearly linked with the rise of Australian nationalism, akin to anti-Orientalism and part of a generalised xenophobia. As noted earlier, White Australia Policy lobbying was, in part, spurred by the desire to keep Russian Jews out of the country. Fear or dislike of the Jew as all-powerful capitalist was compounded by claims that the Jew was spiritually ‘in tune’ with Bolshevism or other manifestations of political subversiveness in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

‘Grumblings and rumblings’ increased inevitably (as they had done in the 1890s) in response to the arrival of sizeable numbers of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. The Australian branch of the Social Credit movement warned against Jewish banking interests in its journal New Times and even went so far as to reprint the notorious forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion (two decades after the London Times had publicly exposed the booklet as a fake). Several other right-wing, antisemitic groups emerged briefly in the 1930s, among them the Guild of Watchmen (with headquarters in South Australia), the Sydney-based New Guard, a scattering of Nazi Party offshoots, and the Australia First movement. Public statements by antisemitic politicians such as Victorian MLA Sir Frank Clarke or Federal Liberal H M Gullett, while isolated, were nonetheless disturbing. See Chapter 2 of this guide for records which appear to underline a degree of antisemitism in Government departments which formulated and implemented immigration policy.

From the early 1940s, the chief mouthpiece for lunatic-fringe anti-Jewish rhetoric was the League of Rights. As W D Rubinstein has written:

For over fifty years its magazines have presented a ceaseless stream of antisemitic hatred and propaganda, while today it is the most important Australian distributor of antisemitic books from overseas, many from European and American neo-Nazi sources...[60]

A degree of antisemitism has characterised some criticism by left-wing groups of Israel (particularly since the Six-day War of 1967). The phenomenon of Holocaust denial has enjoyed some vocal endorsement in Australia while periodic attacks on Jewish buildings continue to cause concern to the community.

By and large, however, antisemitism has declined markedly in Australia, in line with the trend towards multiculturalism and in line, also, with the average Australian’s increasing sophistication. Surveys conducted by the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs indicate a predominantly positive view of Jews among the greater Australian public. The Jewish community itself has worked concertedly to arrest any outbreak of antisemitic fervour, first through the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, and latterly, through the anti-defamation and public relations sub-committees of the various communal roof-bodies.[61]

A survey of records has located several series which contain items dealing with antisemitism. These include:

Jews and Australian communism

Claims of sinister conspiracies by Jews to achieve world domination by manipulating foreign capital or overthrowing the established order, have been manufactured and propagated by antisemites since the late 19th century. In particular, the belief that Eastern European Jews dominated the Bolshevik movement, and that they had actively colluded with German Jews to bring down Czar Nicholas, was widespread among sectors of the population in Britain (and the Empire), and was reinforced by perpetuation of the myth in popular fiction during the inter-war years. Although vastly exaggerated, this Jew-communist linkage was not without some basis in fact. A small number of Jews had been part of Lenin’s first government. Lev Davidovich Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign and Military Affairs under Lenin, and the two best-known women revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, were Jews. Russian-born Jews were active (and visible) in running the Communist Party in Britain. David Rechter has written:

In the period following the Russian Revolution, communists and the Soviet Union were seen by many Jews as their staunchest defenders and most reliable allies in the fight against fascism. This period saw a marked coincidence of interests between Jews and the communist Left, with anti-fascism providing a framework within which Jews could be both communist and Jewish.[62]

It is not surprising, therefore, that public concern at the so-called ‘red menace’ focused, not infrequently, on Jews.

Although W D Rubinstein has argued that the organised Jewish ‘Left’ in this country has always been discernibly weaker than in many other Diaspora communities and that the majority of Eastern European Jewish migrants were Zionists, Bundists, religiously Orthodox, and otherwise fundamentally opposed to communism. But he acknowledges that there can be no doubt that a sizeable number of Jews has been active in left-wing politics in Australia (including the running of various socialist and communist groups) from pre-1917 to the present.[63] As a local variant on a worldwide phenomenon, a small Jewish communist movement emerged and evolved in Australia from the 1920s to the 1950s. Immigrant-based, its centre was in Melbourne.

The Gezerd, for instance, a fearlessly Stalinist ‘satellite’ group which endorsed Jewish agricultural settlement in the USSR, dominated leftist politics in the 1930s. Newman Rosenthal, conservative editor of the Australian Jewish Herald and spokesman for the Anglo-Jewish establishment, bluntly dubbed Gezerd members an ‘undesirable foreign element’.[64] Founded by Polish Jews, the group boasted several hundred members by the mid-1930s. It opened ‘Culture House’ in Carlton in 1938, established a sub-branch in Sydney, and joined forces briefly with the staunchly anti-communist workers party, the Bund, in the common fight against European Fascism. The alliance broke down following the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. The Gezerd’s membership declined rapidly during the war, the group folding in 1944.

The Jewish Left in Melbourne continued its wartime engagement in anti-Fascist activity through the Jewish War Effort Circle, the Jewish committee of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society and, most importantly, the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism (JCCFAS), the last founded in 1942. The JCCFAS rapidly became a major player in communal politics in Melbourne. However, claims that it was increasingly dominated by communists and fellow-travellers by the late 1940s, ultimately led to it being expelled from the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies in 1952. That expulsion, at the height of the Cold War, has been judged ‘one of the fundamental turning points in our recent history, marking the end of an effective or organised [Jewish] left’ in Australia.

During the same period, with the Communist Party Dissolution Bill being debated by Federal parliament, attention focused also on the Kadimah Youth Organisation (group members were interviewed by the police) and other youth groups such as the Habonim Zionist Club. W D Rubinstein notes that the youth organisations were effectively ‘purged’ of communist influences.[65]

Meanwhile, individual Jewish activists such as Alick Mushin, Norman Rothfield, Isaac Gust, Amirah Inglis and Judah Waten, were subject to systematic surveillance and police harassment. In most cases, the commitment of Australian Jews to communism did not survive revelations of Stalinist atrocities. As David Rechter has written:

Developments in the post-war period – the impact of the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, Soviet antisemitism and the cold war – undermined Jewish communism, and helped bring about new expressions of Jewish political and cultural identity. By the mid to late 1950s, the Jewish political environment (international and Australian) was transformed, and an active Jewish communist had become almost an anachronism.[66]

The National Archives holds numerous records dealing with Jewish involvement in communism and other radical political activity, most of them records of investigations (by ASIO and its forerunners) into groups or individuals. Implicit in many of the records is the assumption that Jews – as recently arrived ‘foreigners’ – may have dual loyalties and may be working against the national good. Major sources for records of investigation into suspect organisations or individuals include: